Sprint's LTE network is steadily improving. But it's not the best in the country. So Sprint overreached today with a press release and blog post touting some very selective Nielsen results showing Sprint's "LTE Plus Network" as being the fastest nationwide.

I run a big drive-test project every year called Fastest Mobile Networks, and I'm in frequent touch with some of the big players in network measurement: OpenSignal, RootMetrics, Sensorly, Mosaik, and Ookla Speedtest.net (which shares a parent company with PCMag.) After examining Sprint's release and blog post, I wanted to call out a few things.

Nielsen's methodology is very different than everyone else's. Most network testing firms just pump a lot of data down a carrier's pipe to see how fat it is. According to Sprint, Nielsen uses an app running in the background on Android phones, which records download speeds in "common applications such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, Snapchat, and others." The company says it surveys "tens of thousands" of users in 44 metro areas nationwide.

Those results disadvantage T-Mobile because of its Binge On plan, which can be detected as throttling video to 1.5Mbps. So Nielsen's T-Mobile numbers are dragged down by all of the video streams that it has decided are 1.5Mbps each, which say nothing about the quality of the network.

Sprint CTO John Saw's post about the network win also cites RootMetrics, saying that Sprint came out very close to Verizon in Houston, Austin, Boise, and Denver. Houston and Denver were two of the three cities where Sprint won or tied for first place in Root's most recent round of speed tests. Root tests 125 cities.

Sprint's LTE Plus claims also seem to be based on download numbers only. In our Fastest Mobile Networks tests, we've been giving upload speeds some weight because social media has made uploads more important with time. According to Ookla's Speedtest Intelligence data, Sprint has the slowest mean LTE upload speed of the four major carriers over the past 30 days, with an upload speed of 4.79Mbps.

And notice it says nothing about coverage, which is Sprint's big LTE bugaboo. Sprint's super-fast network relies on 2.5GHz spectrum, which has very short range. According to OpenSignal's Q3 2015 "State of LTE" report, Sprint had the least LTE coverage of any US network, with its customers receiving LTE 64 percent of the time, as compared to T-Mobile at 77 percent, AT&T at 81 percent, and Verizon at 84 percent. When we drove around the country last May, we found Sprint's LTE network had nowhere near the reach of Verizon's or AT&T's. But that was last May.

That's the Bad News ...The overreaching here is a little tragic because Sprint is in fact doing a heck of a lot better than it used to.

Nationwide, during 2015, Sprint's mean LTE download speeds increased from 9.76Mbps to 15.28Mbps, according to Speedtest Intelligence. That's still in fourth place, but it's a much bigger jump than anyone else experienced, and it vaults Sprint from uncompetitive to competitive.

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There's similar improvement in a lot of major cities, and unlike with Nielsen, different measurements agree here. In Chicago, for instance, RootMetrics says that Sprint's media download speed increased from 13.1Mbps to 22Mbps between May and November. That's "LTE Plus" right there. Speedtest Intelligence agrees: in Chicago, Sprint averaged 10.41Mbps down on LTE in May, and 16.95Mbps in November, a better download speed than T-Mobile (although everyone else crushed it on uploads.)

Sprint's customer experience will improve further as more people get off old phones, which don't support its new carrier aggregation technology, and onto phones like the iPhone 6s, which do. When we reviewed the iPhone 6s, we found Sprint download speeds were 50 percent faster than on the iPhone 6, all because the new phone supported the new network technologies.

So no, Sprint's LTE network is not the fastest nationwide, especially if you take upload speeds into account. But it's much, much faster than it used to be. Over the past year, it's become truly competitive for the first time since 2009. And coupled with newer devices, its super-cheap plans are worth looking into, although we're still waiting on more data about coverage. Our annual drive testing, done this May, will help with that part of the story.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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